Frederick Hawksworth

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Preserved Modified Hall 7903 Foremarke Hall.

1009 County of Carmarthen at Bristol Temple Meads, 1960.

Frederick W. Hawksworth, (1884 – 1976), joined the Great Western Railway in 1898, aged 15; he did not, however, become the Chief Mechanical Engineer until he was 57, in 1941. Having been at the forefront of Locomotive development under George Jackson Churchward ideas at Swindon had become somewhat stagnated under the later years of his successor Charles B. Collett, whose reluctance to give up the CME's post resulted in Mr. Hawksworth's lateness in taking up this position.

Hawksworth had the ability, experience and vision to put the Great Western back in its former respected position, but the circumstances were to conspire against him, the wartime climate of austerity and government control of the railways' activities for the War Effort prevented several bold ideas from becoming a reality, Including a design for a new Pacific for the Great Western, that would, in theory have been the most powerful Express Locomotive in Britain.

Because of this situation, Hawksworth concentrated his efforts on improving the Railway's Existing Stock, being noted for updating the existing Hall Class, to produce the Modified Hall. His new Designs were few, the most famous being the County Class 4-6-0, which used concepts developed for his thwarted pacific project and took their names from a no-longer extant 4-4-0 of Churchward's. They were the last GW 2-cylinder 4-6-0's ending a tradition that began with the Saints 42 years before. Their boilers were based on the LMS Class 8 2-8-0 Boiler, as a number of these had been built at Swindon during WW2 no doubt allowing Hawksworth to study the design in detail. Other designs included a taper boilered 0-6-0 Pannier tank, unusual on the GWR in that the tanks stopped short of the smoke box, a similar 0-6-0 with outside Walschaerts valve gear and no running plate (totally new ideas on the Great Western) designed for Pilot work around large stations, and a very light conventional 0-6-0 Pannier Tank.

Examples of all Hawksworth's designs survive excluding the County, but the Great Western Society is in the process of building a new County, a replica of No.1014 County of Glamorgan, using the frames of a Modified Hall and the boiler ofn LMS Class 8 2-8-0, and an original chimney from No.1006 County of Cornwall.

Hawksworth remained Chief Mechanical Engineer of the Great Western until the Formation of British Rail. He continued working in locomotive design after the amalgamation of GWR and the other of the big four companies -- the London, Midland and Scottish Railway, Southern Railway and the London and North Eastern Railway -- into British Railways in 1947. He retired in 1949 and died 27 years later in 1976.